Letters to the Editor

Regarding Phil Hughes' article in the December issue of
LJ, please help push further development of
Arena. Netscape is huge, slow, and our only option. I now use Lynx
for almost all my browsing because Netscape is so slow on my
system. Arena runs well, but cannot handle forms, one of the most
functional features of a web browser. Like many people, I am not
interested in background patterns and enhanced fonts. I want easy
access to information, which I am unable to get with Netscape or
the current Arena.

Linux Journalhas a sister publication called
WEBsmith™, and its editor, Jon Gross, was recently involved in a
World Wide Web conference. We asked him to
respond:

I (and many others) agree with your summation of the status
of the browser selection available at this point. In December, I
was at the 4th International World Wide Web conference in Boston,
and a group of us started talking, and decided it was time to start
a Free Browser project, modeled on the Linux community, to address
exactly this problem. We are putting a mildly cohesive framework
together before “going public” but your input is certainly
appreciated. The Linux community has much to offer this project,
and I think we can definitely build a better mousetrap. A mailing
list has been set up. See
www.base.com/gordoni/web/www4-bof.html
for more information.

—Websmith Magazine Editor, Jonathan Gross

Sticky Mistake

“The chmod Command” by Eric Goebelbecker
(LJ #21) was an excellent introduction to the
sometimes counterintuitive file and directory permissions of
Unix-like operating systems. Near the end, however, there is a
misstatement concerning the “sticky bit”. This bit actually has a
very important, though obscure, use on Linux systems.

The sticky bit got its name on early Unix systems in the days
before demand-paged virtual memory. If the sticky bit of an
executable file was set, after the program exited a copy of its
text segment was saved in the system's swap area, i.e., it would
“stick around” for the next use. This feature was used to make
frequently-run programs load a little bit faster. This meaning of
the sticky bit is no longer particularly relevant.

Although it is not a part of the POSIX specification, recent
System V and Berkeley Unix systems defined a new meaning for the
sticky bit. If a directory's sticky bit is set, a file in the
directory may be deleted only by the file's owner, by the
directory's owner, or by root. This provides an additional measure
of security for directories such as /tmp. Linux, of course,
supports this useful feature. For example, on my system:

Mea Culpa. Thank you for pointing out that mistake.
It should never have passed through editing.

Things have changed

I read your article on LISP-Stat last August with much
interest, and have just got around to trying it out. One
inconsistency: the article claims that the “dld” library is
essential. This is not true; if you build Lisp-Stat from scratch,
it will use the now-standard “dlopen” method for dynamic loading
(based on the ld.so library) if it is present. In fact, “dld” no
longer seems to work with current “a.out” style static libraries,
let alone ELF libraries.

I compiled the thing for ELF using gcc 2.7.0 and everything
worked just great. The compile time is rather long (about an hour
on a 486-33 with 20M memory), especially since a lot of the code is
in LISP. All of the book examples worked perfectly. A marvellous
way to review long-forgotten stats material.

You are doing an excellent job at presenting intriguing
applications for Linux. Please keep up the great work!